Teacher’s Beliefs About Early Marriage and Girl's Decision Making in Oromia, Ethiopia Contextualized by Globalized Debates on Marriage and Girls’ Education

• In Event: Gendering the Work of Teachers and Education Professionals

Proposal

Understanding early marriage is crucial to progressing insight on hindrances to and effects of girls’ education. Given the increased barriers to schooling that girls and young women are navigating in the COVID-19 pandemic (Fry & Lei, 2020), examining the relationship between early marriage decision making practices and girls’ education has meaningful implications in this global moment and beyond. While work on the processes and repercussions of early marriage often overlaps with girls’ education— remarkably little is known about how teachers, as practitioners of education and nexuses between formal education systems and students, interpret early marriage and further how these perceptions might ultimately contribute to the martial decisions of female students. With the purpose of examining teacher’s meaning making about early marriage, this paper asks: in the context of Oromia, Ethiopia, how do teachers understand early marriage practices, and how might those understandings ultimately influence educator’s roles in student’s marital decision-making processes?

Dominant discourses (often patriarchal and colonizing) regarding gendered education gaps generally center individual benefits and development potential of, and barriers to girls’ education in low- and middle-income countries (Filmer, 2005; Grown et al., 2003). Girls’ formal education is often distinguished for its “positive” impacts on individual young female students (including delayed first marriage) and broader (inter)national development initiatives (Bertini & Ceretti, 2020; Sperling, Gene; Winthrop, 2015; Vavrus, 2003). These causal assumptions imply that improving girl’s education (access, enrollment, completion) is synonymous with achieving social gender parity (Mjaaland, 2013). However, counter conversations challenge the colonizing, universalizing, appropriating, and patriarchal roots attached to rationales for popular investment in girls’ education (Filmer, 2005). These critical perspectives problematize the conceptions of both “girls” and “education” as defined by hyper specific (western, oppressive, colonizing) thinking (Bent, 2013; Desai, 2016; Hickel, 2014; Khoja-Moolji, 2018; Switzer, 2013).

In contrast to girls’ education, dominate discourses on early marriage concentrate on “detrimental” impacts on young women and girls (United Nations Children’s Fund, 2014)— and therefore often emphasizes the prevention of early unions among girls (UN General Assembly, 1948; Wodon et al., 2017). Because early marriage often impacts girls (Wodon et al., 2017), these practices are often considered a “specific gendered harm” (Gill & Anitha, 2011, p. 7). The process of early marriage, like childhood and marriage, has varied historical, cultural, and political contexts (Bunting, 2005, p. 25). Gendered and aged norms and expectations influence decision making processes about these unions— not only dictating who makes marital decisions (generally not young women and girls themselves), but also what factors inform those choices (Gangoli et al., 2009; Jensen & Thornton, 2003).

Discussions on girls’ education and early marriage often meet in a complex and reciprocal relationship. At the intersection of these discourses, girls’ education (access, enrollment, and achievement), is typically characterized as both a cause and effect of early marriage (Bunting, 2005; Mathur et al., 2003; Singh & Samara, 1996)— framing them in a dichotomous relationship, as both opposite and inseparable. This relationship, complicated by varied definitions and constructions mentioned previously, highlights the importance of considering girls’ education and early marriage processes together (Seginer & Mahajna, 2015,). However, there is a notable gap in these intersecting dialogues on how precisely education (systems, practices, programs, and practitioners) contribute to early marriage prevention. Additionally, comparative international education research has made little contribution to these discussions, dominant or critical, leaving education perspectives on these topics is largely underrepresented.

Centering a critical educational perspective, this analysis uses a feminist pedagogy theoretical framework to examine teacher’s understandings of early marriage. In opposition to gender-blind traditions of critical pedagogy, feminist pedagogy is “concerned with questions of power, equity and authority in the classroom” while considering “gender as a critical factor into the equation” (Kirsch, 1995, p. 723). By recognizing the power dynamics and “multiple and contradictory subject positions” inherent in educational spaces (Ellsworth, 1989), this theoretical perspective is particularly useful for considering how teachers understand and influence female students and their early marriage and education decision-making processes.

Guided by feminist pedagogy, this secondary qualitative data analysis explores uncoded transcripts (acquired via informal data sharing (Heaton, 2008, p. 34)) of individual interviews with 20 formal educators from Oromia, Ethiopia. Originally, this data was collected in a 2014 global public health evaluation of early marriage prevention programming for girls (The Oromia Development Association Comprehensive Adolescent/Youth Sexual and Reproductive Health Project (“ODA”)). ODA was implemented as a school-based program with trained teachers based in Oromia and sought to reduce early marriage while promoting adolescent female sexual and reproductive health. Teachers included for analysis were identified by girls (centered in original analysis as the principle actors of interest) as having played a principle role in their martial decision-making process. Interviews were audio-recorded, de-identified, transcribed, and translated into English— I have analyzed the data for principle themes in this translated and deidentified form.

Focusing on this subset of data allowed me to consider how teachers, in formal education spaces, contribute to early marriage decisions, a question previously unexplored in earlier analyses of this data and in comparative education research more broadly. Critical feminist pedagogical perspectives enable me to focus on gendered power dynamics and norms of formal education relationships between educators and students and beliefs and perceptions regarding early marriage and marital decision-making processes. Preliminary findings reveal that teachers understand early marriage practices as “backwards” and enforced by community cultural norms. For teachers, early marriage is understood as part and parcel to early pregnancy and thus is recognized as a direct threat to girls’ health and physical safety as well as a demonstration of lack of value in girls’ education. With these perceptions, teachers also reveal understanding their position in marital decision-making processes as principle contestants to early unions on behalf of female students— and thus also distinguish themselves as more “progressive” than their larger community and girl students themselves.

Author

• Natalie Starr Wyss, University of Wisconsin-Madison